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Comment by DanBC | Hacker News Reader

All the research we have shows, very clearly, that shaming people does not work.

I would personally be ashamed to mock someone for being overweight. But I'm worried about the ongoing shaming of shame. Shame is an unpleasant feeling, but also a socially-useful force. It enforces compliance of valuable social norms (e.g. not urinating in public). It is also the twin of duty. It's difficult to imagine people doing things out of a sense of duty without a corresponding sense of shame for a lapse in duty.

Neither duty nor shame feel like healthy ways to encourage social norms. They make the world feel hostile and intimidating rather than warm and accepting. Better to foster and appeal to compassion and wisdom.

IMO compassion is too weak and diffuse to be a replacement for duty and shame. I feel compassion towards a lot of people, e.g. the people suffering from hurricane Ian, but I feel no duty to drop what I'm doing to help them, and no shame about not doing so. Whereas if a friend or family member were in dire need, I would have those feelings. This is a good thing. Society would cease to function if compassion were as strong as duty and shame, and everyone dropped everything to help anyone in need anywhere in the world.

Compassion doesn't have to be equal towards all people! It rarely is; it's natural to feel more compassion towards people that are emotionally closer to you. If I help a friend or family member in need, it's not because I feel some sense of duty, but because I care about them and don't want them to suffer.

I don't think having compassion for fat people ever did them any good. That sounds too much like enabling. If you can't bring yourself to criticize fatness, better for you to simply stay silent about it and say nothing.

It sounds like you're taking compassion to mean simply being nice or polite to someone? That's understandable as it is often used in that way. I could have made it clearer but I was using the more nuanced definition of empathising with and wanting to help someone [0]. In this sense it is not the same thing as enabling or refusing to criticise, since neither of those are helpful. It's more to do with the manner in which you deliver the feedback.

For example, suppose you catch yourself being tempted by a box of cookies. You could respond to this in a shame-based manner, or in a compassion-based manner:

Shame-based: you're already way too fat. You don't deserve those cookies so you shouldn't have them. It's no wonder you're not getting dates if this is how easily you're tempted.

Compassion-based: Wow, yes those cookies do look tasty, and it's no surprise you're tempted since you didn't sleep great last night and had a stressful morning to boot. It's natural and okay to have that desire for satiated fullness! But you don't have to let those feelings define your behaviour. Let's take a step back and think through the consequences of eating those cookies. Sure it will feel good at first. But the chances are that the good feelings will last less than an hour, after which you might feel regret about not sticking to your diet. Is it really worth the trade-off? Suddenly those cookies don't seem so tempting, do they?

The problem with shame-based feedback is that it simply adds to the negative feelings that a fat person is already likely to be having. Think of obesity and over-eating as an addiction to eating, on the same level as an addiction to gambling, drugs, or pornography. The behaviour is a crux, a way to get nice feeling in the short-term to avoid the work of dealing with difficult feelings. Over time, one's fear of those difficult feelings and dependence on the quick-fix grows. Adding another difficult feeling into the mix might help alleviate the behaviour in the short term, but won't reduce the emotional suffering or provide any basis for which to start learning to deal with the deeper cause.

[0] https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/topic/compassion/definition

Well I don’t feel shame about it at all. And I have been obese my whole life. I needed someone to shame me to light the fire under me to begin losing weight. Coddling me was what made me obese in the first place

Don't be so quick to assume. Asian cultures have a lot of shaming and they don't have this problem.

It worked just fine against smoking.

Not really. Making it impractical worked against smoking. Cars stopped coming with lighters and ash trays. Where smoking is still allowed, it's in a separate section or a bench out back. Triggers for the habit are increasingly absent from media and advertising.

The equivalent here would be banning the over-engineered foods that cause the problem. The common thing is the breaking of a habit. The harder it is to reenforce, the less it's done.

I think kids coming home from school after learning about smoking and shaming their parents for it had a lot to do with the demise of smoking. It made adults ashamed to smoke in their own homes, where anti-smoking laws and norms otherwise had no effect. When parents knew that their kids knew they were being harmed by the habit, that gave a lot of people a strong incentive to quit. Or at least to only smoke outside.

No, it didn't. The only things that worked were increasing the price and providing nicotine replacement treatment.

Beatings will continue until morale improves...

Anti-bullying rules in schools will continue until the children get thinner...

Look at where we were 50 years ago, and where we are today. 50 years ago, lots of bullying but fat kids were rare. Today we have far less bullying, and a ton of fat kids. I don't think it's working.

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